M-Disc said to be able to withstand boiling water and liquid nitrogen

If you believe what Apple is saying about the dying media format that is the CD/DVD (hence the lack of optical drives on the MacBook Air and the latest refresh of the Mac Mini), then you have to wonder why would a company still attempt to innovate the CD despite reports of its declining status. However if you believe that optical media is still the best way to back up your data then perhaps the M-Disc might be something you could be interested in.

Millenniata and LG have apparently teamed up to produce the M-Disc, which is a disc of “stone-like” quality and made out of a “natural” substance. The difference is that unlike normal CDs that have a reflective undercoating, whatever you burn onto the M-Disc is actually etched onto the stone-like substance, much like how the first music recordings were made by etching the patterns of sound waves on a cylindrical piece of wax.

The mark made on the M-Disc is supposed to be permanent which means theoretically it should last you forever, and apparently dipping it into boiling water and liquid nitrogen does not cause any damage to the disc. It requires no special machine to read and any DVD-player should be able to read it, plus it’s also supposed to be backwards compatible.

It stores just as much as a DVD, 4.7GB but at the moment it only writes at half the speed – 4x although its engineers are working on making it 8x. Like we said it does not require any special machine to read the disc but you will need a special machine to be able to write on it. If you still have faith in the optical media format, a read-write player for the M-Disc is said to be released in October with the M-Discs available for just under $3 per disc.